2026 FESTIVAL PANELS

9:00 - 10:15 Orr Street Studios

Featuring: George Frazier, Leslie VonHolten, Andy Oler, Kieron Walquist; Moderator: Nancy Bell 

Big rivers, sweeping prairies, cities, towns, graveyards, homes, farms, fields, back roads and back woods: alumni from the pages of The New Territory magazine will take you on literary adventures to the Ozarks and Great Plains, and reflect on how writing influences a sense of self in an often overlooked region. If place-writing is your interest, you'll locate a lot to love in this panel.

3:15 - 4:45 Serendipity

Featuring: AnnElise Hatjakes, Claire Vaye Watkins, Christopher Coake; Moderator: Tina Casagrand Foss

How does fiction set in a place full of guns, goldmines, and gamblers explore desire, obsession, hard choices, and morality? Three writers from northern Nevada embrace the edginess of Reno and the dynamic nature of the entire region.

5:15 - 6:30 Serendipity

Featuring: Daniel Henning, Joe Skelley; Moderator: Grace Hagen

How do voice actors create a recognizable canon? When bringing words to life, creative interpretation of a text can lift a literary work to a new level of connection between authors and audience. This conversation will deep-dive into embodying characters vs. performing lines, and how both combine to help books reach readers and listeners.

9:00 - 10:15 Broadway Hotel - Katy Ballroom

Featuring: Wright Thompson, Gwen Paradice, Sam Cohen; Moderator: Cristina Mislán

When tragedy or conflict unsettles a community, the full story doesn’t always rise to the surface. Pain can fold inward, becoming a guarded secret, a quiet omission, or a silence shaped by fear or shame. In this conversation, three writers examine how their respective forms of record-making illuminate what communities cannot or will not say aloud.

1:30 - 2:45 Serendipity

Featuring: Kyle Minor, Mitchell Douglas, Naeem Murr; Moderator: Simon Rose

Disappearances seize the public interest: Ambrose Bierce, Jimmy Hoffa, and Amelia Earhart still inspire curiosity because their disappearances are unsolved. But voluntary disappearances are equally fascinating, with a rich history of their own: Agatha Christie feigned her own disappearance to get back at her philandering husband. These writers explore what disappearance looks like in the age of the internet, through a literary lens.

10:45 - 12:00 Little Ragtag

Featuring: Jean Becker; Moderator: Charles Zug

Behind every polished presidential moment is an "advance team" tasked with managing the high-stakes logistics the public never sees. Jean Becker, chief of staff to President George H.W. Bush for nearly 25 years, shares funny and touching stories from vital teams over the years. This panel is sponsored by the Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy.

12:00 - 1:15 Broadway Hotel, Katy Ballroom

Featuring: Jared Schroeder, David Carson; Moderator: J. Scott Christianson

How has AI changed our relationship with truth? This discussion between a legal scholar and photojournalist who advocate for intellectual property examines how the fast-evolving information landscape and visual narratives intersect with the First Amendment, intellectual property, and modern democracy. This panel is sponsored by MU Libraries.

10:45 - 12:00 Serendipity

Featuring: Sarah Kendzior, BJ Soloy, Nancy Crochiere, Sam Kolawole; Moderator: Caylin Capra-Thomas

The old adage about there being only two plots in literature—someone goes on a journey, or a stranger comes to town—might be one of the most famous things Tolstoy never said. But we cleave to it because movement is central to literature that moves us. Climb aboard as two novelists, a poet, and a nonfiction writer navigate a conversation about road trips, quests, and journeys.

1:30 - 2:45 Broadway Hotel - Katy Ballroom

Featuring: Steve Almond, Tony Tulathimutte, Kathryn Nuernberger ; Moderator: Jenny Bossaller

These thought-provoking books prod our nerves and inspire us to action; their authors grapple with the mistakes of our society: from violence to loss, from personal tragedies to climate change. Their novels, manifestos, and essays argue for change in ways that are variously loud, humanistic, and tender.

9:00 - 10:15 Serendipity

Featuring: Janet Saidi, Devoney Looser 

The 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth launched a worldwide celebration of her work. This intimate conversation between two experts will explore Austen's broad impact on culture, society, and literary genres of all kinds, throughout history, the present, and the future.

3:15 - 4:45 Broadway Hotel - Katy Ballroom

Featuring: Justin Key, Erin E. Adams, LD Lewis; Moderator: John Joseph Adams

Join these acclaimed writers as they discuss the terrors, histories, and imaginative freedoms that shape contemporary Black horror, and how the genre opens new space for confronting power, fear, and the uncanny. This panel brings together contributors to Out There Screaming: New Black Horror, the celebrated anthology coedited by John Joseph Adams and Jordan Peele.

1:30 - 2:45 Big Ragtag

Featuring: Kiliii Yuyan

Come meet the winner of the Environmental Vision Award at the 82nd Reynolds Journalism Institute Picture of the Year contest! Yuyan's work invites audiences to rethink their connection to the environment. A contributor to National Geographic and descendant of the Nanai/Hèzhé people, Yuyan offers a profound perspective on the relationship between humanity and the natural world.

5:15 - 6:30 Broadway Hotel - Ridgeline

Featuring: Alec MacGillis, Dan Kaufman, Christopher Leonard; Moderator: Kathy Kiely

There are plenty of reasons to be concerned about our government and the people they serve; among them are economic inequality, corporate exploitation, and billionaire technocrats. A few bold writers are taking on the powerful corporate interests that undermine social cohesion in America. Part of the Watchdog Writers Group at the MU School of Journalism. 

5:15 - 6:30 Orr Street Studio

Featuring: Samuel Kolawole, Olivia Muenter, Kyle Minor, Alison C. Rollins, Christopher Coake, Jenna Blum; Moderator: Alex George

Ah, the book tour: stretch limos, chic hotels, adoring crowds, endless signing lines, big sales, and parties and receptions in your honor. Or, you know, perhaps not. Every author has at least one favorite fiasco from their adventures on the road, and our guests will be sharing these dispatches – from the humbling to the hilarious, from the inspiring to the best forgotten. Come and be entertained as we go behind the scenes of the fabled book tour

1:30 - 2:45 Orr Street Studios

Featuring: Ted Genoways, Caleb Gayle; Moderator: Christopher Leonard

Investigative journalists have spent years reviving iconic historical characters into novel-paced nonfiction. These writers focus on revolutionaries who deserve a second look, and whose stories reveal as much about the present as they do about the past. Part of the Watchdog Writers Group at the MU School of Journalism.

10:45 - 12:00 Orr Street Studios

Featuring: Amber Adams, Jillian Danback-McGhan, Lena S. Andrews; Moderator: Grace Hagen

Veterans often turn to literature to process, make sense of, and illuminate their military experience, and sometimes bring that experience to bear on their own literary endeavors. This is as true of women who have served in the military as it is of men. A scholar of the history of women in the military will participate in an in-depth conversation with a poet and a fiction writer, both women and military veterans.

10:45 - 12:00 Broadway Hotel - Katy Ballroom

Featuring: Julie Carrick Dalton, Andrea Rexilius, RK Fauth; Moderator: Rachel Walker

Bees! Vital pollinators, honeymakers, and an often overlooked presence in both our ecosystems and our literature. In this panel, a poet, a fiction writer, and an essayist explore how bees appear in their recent work and why this small, hidden species carries such narrative and ecological significance. Together, they consider what bees reveal about environment, interdependence, and how to tap into the hivemind.

1:30 - 2:45 Little Ragtag

Featuring: Jennifer Maritza McCauley, Steven Leyva, and Donald Quist; Moderator: Sheri-Marie Harrison

Anime, Comic Books, Star Wars, Dungeons & Dragons, and nerdiness in all its fun and various guises. How do these subcultures manifest in literary representation? These three writers will discuss the attitudes, the references, the history, and the terminology associated with nerd culture and nerd literature, and welcome you into the Borg.

5:15 - 6:30 Broadway Hotel - Katy Ballroom

Featuring: Wright Thompson, Michelle Anderson, Ted Genoways ; Moderator: Jim Meyer

Write drunk, Ernest Hemingway allegedly wrote, and edit sober. Not all writers seek inspiration at the bottom of a bottle, but booze remains a subject of fascination for many. We gather three authors – a novelist and two nonfiction writers – who have written about the hard stuff and the iconic, cultural, and commercial roles it has played in American life over the years. Cheers!

3:15 - 4:45 Broadway Ridgeline

Featuring: Leah Sottile, Olivia Muenter, Joshua Wheeler; Moderator: Caroline Dohack

Crystals and cults and conspiracies, oh my! We're reading the American New Age—its chart, its cards, its palms, you name it—and the forecast is...complicated. Two novelists and a journalist join forces to discuss our cultural, and countercultural, appetite for the mystical, along with the seedier sides of spirituality on the fringes.